Eminem (was: Influenced by GR?)

[Terrance]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> A Pynchonian take on rap music, I think, might be to note how rapidly
> the street poetry was co-opted by the powers that be, economic and
> cultural, how quickly They made a few lucky rappers swaggering
> advertisements for Capital's most blatant promises in order to keep
> the rest of the kids under control, buying those records, jes' a
> popping that rag to beat the band instead of engaging with the
> politics of their situation -- black kids spinning discs and
> breakdancing  to entertain the white tourists in front of the Hotels
> Plaza and Pierre - that's what this music had already become when I
> made a New York pilgrimage in the very early '80s. Just as the Reagan
> forces needed some Zoyd-like exemplars as a warning of what might go
> wrong again (after getting that '60s revolution under control, with
> the revolutionaries now transfixed by the Tube), so They also got the
> scary gangsta Others necessary to sharpen social divisions in the
> wake of a civil rights political revolution that threatened to break
> out of control.  Divide and conquer. Rap glorifies the violence
> (street and domestic) that flows from Their socio-economic and
> foreign ("war on drugs" that favors the CIA's favorite producers and
> distributors and floods the U.S. with crack) policies, scares the
> shit out of Most Normal Americans, justifies the investment in the
> police state (S.W.A.T. teams and the rest of the paramilitarization
> of local police forces) that's been erected in most American cities
> -- a good example of the Control that Pynchon illuminates in his
> fictions.

This is the political Pynchon, but the social Pynchon has
quite an other story to tell. I think Pynchon, a father of
two sons,  would also say that a lot of rap and hip hop 
music has much to do with Fatherless sons. Fathers, yes,
much has been said about Pynchon's mothers, but his fathers
are far more complex, much more interesting and much more at
the center of his fictions. How many critics have written
about the baby that smiles and some postmodern gas? Yes,
gas, what is Pynchon saying about fathers on page 131? A
little Jung, some one please?